Josephine Bowles

The University of Queensland

Jo Bowles did a PhD in molecular parasitology before seeing the light and moving into the field of developmental biology. Her postdoctoral work was done under the mentorship of Peter Koopman at the Institute for Molecular Bioscience, UQ. During this period, she studied mammalian sex determination and biology of the Sox gene family. As a senior postdoc she began to focus on germ cells and in 2016 moved her team into the School of Biomedical Sciences, UQ.

Her research team aims to understand all of the signalling that is necessary to instruct naive mammalian germ cells to embark on either oogenesis or spermatogenesis. Key discoveries include 1) that retinoic acid in the fetal ovarian environment triggers germ cells to embark on meiosis; 2) that testicular germ cell fate is dependent on FGF signalling; and 3) that the Nodal/Cripto signalling pathway is normally active in germ cells of the fetal testis and abnormally active in certain forms of testis cancer. The studies have relevance to medical problems including fertility/infertility and testicular cancer as well as to our understanding of stem cell biology more broadly.